


A Study In Max

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Fury road, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Max gets drugged against his will, Max sees more ghosts than usual, Post-Fury Road, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 02:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16944966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: This is a gift for my love, whose favorite story is what happens after the story is over. The ending is what you make of it.





	A Study In Max

The legbone is the wrong shape to be an animal. Too small to be a man. He grunts, sniffs it. Only silence. Good. He doesn't feel hungry so he knows he must eat. And most of the bones he finds now try to walk right out of his belly. They talk between his ears.

He slams the bone against the red rock by his left shoulder. Again, again, again till it splinters. One needlesharp shard lands in his cheek. Ah. This bone bites back.

He doesn't _feel_ hungry. So he knows he must eat. The marrow is still soft, but it's absorbed the bitter blue taste of the air. There's not much, but he's learned that it's better to be hungry than to not feel hungry.

A whisper behind him. He spins. Raises his head and scents, nostrils pulsing. The shimmering chorus of dead in the air isn't what he's worried about just now. It's the living-- the half-dead-- that have made more trouble for him lately.

When it's safe to turn back, she's there. Small and young and pale. Desert-eaten eye. Guilty blood on her lips, like she'd found her mother's lipstick.

Her father's guilt.

“One.” Her voice is soft. It hurts his ears like a needle of bone. His eyes go wide. “One two. One. Red. Black. _Go.”_

Her skeletal hand snaps out and points. His grubby hand snaps out and grabs air. “Huh,” he says and stares at his empty fist.

The throat of the desert opens and roars.

The sky is the color of panic. He wheels. Reduced to a thing that screams _survive,_ an eight-cylinder heart, hydraulic legs and guzzoline breath, he throws himself on the bike, wrenches it around in the narrow alley, and rockets away.

The sound behind him is deep; not a bike. _Big_. Rig? Hers? Could be. There are others than hers, but he does not trust the bloody-lipped ghost girl. Does not hate Furiosa, but does not want her to grip him again.

There had been a man whose voice was a relic from a greener time. A voice that had more colors than sand and more soul than a rainstorm. But the words on his flesh were black, and those were the ones he'd spoken from. The future: trouble and more trouble before a snatch of peace, and then trouble again.

He does not hate Furiosa, but he has another ghost within a ghost because of her. A set of tiny bones that walk in the bigger bones' belly and talk in his brain. No more.

Rocks whip by. The bike shivers beneath him. He swerves as the alley does, a fantail of dust spuming up from the back wheel. A masked thing on a shrieking bike pounces on him from a rock above. He snarls. Ahead of him are rocks the color of rage. He speeds toward them. There is a pack of yelling things behind him now. Behind them, the rig.

“Road Warrior.”

The man is inside his head. The voice is on the sloping rock ahead of him. He follows the heavy voice and the man chokes his hand down on the gas. The man's hair whips into his eyes. If he can make the jump, there is a way back to the open.

He's in the air. His gut swoops almost pleasantly. Bullets swarm and whine. The bike lands on the plateau wrong; his jaws snap together and a flood of coppery blood in his mouth follows a snarl of pain on his tongue. He spits. Red flecks appear on his pursuer's goggles. The bike slews on the narrow cliff path like a spooked pony, but he rights it. His eyes are wide and white, rolling like a spooked pony's.

A path. He's in someone's territory. It smells wrong. It smells.

The sky is a sonic boom. The sand is more velvet-shifty than blood. Sunlight is its own heavy coat and hood. There are a million throats: the killed that lie just beneath the traitor sand, the endless wind. They say-- the half-dead do-- that as long as there is wind, there are Before-bones that have not yet turned to dust. There are ghosts that still worry the air with expired portents of death already unleashed.

What, then, when there are no untumored bones left, and the wind dies? Would it be peaceful? Or not?

It smells. The wasteland fills you up with sound and color and hit and bite and pain on top of pain. But the greedy wasteland takes the senses that keep you sane: smiles, softness, scent.

So when you smell something that's not the wasteland (dancing sand greasy gas uneasy stone), you leave. Fast. Because the corruption that the owners of the Before-bones seeded in the ground will kill you slowly but the owners of the bad smell will kill you quick.

So he guns it.

The things on bikes whoop and holler. The big rig-noise veers left, away. The girl with the bloody lip is on the rocks ahead of him. Something hard bounces off his back. “ _Hey_ ,” the word clicks like fangs in his mouth. Her skeletal hand snaps out and points. His grubby hand snaps out and grabs the next thrown thing. He throws it back at them without turning.

 _Kaboom_.

He is pushed by a great slapping wall of heat. The bike stutters on its front wheel. His lips pull back from his teeth in a grimace of fear; down at the bottom of the cliff is the topography of death. His pony bucks him off.

“Shit,” he says.

He wakes in a bath of bright, glassy pain. Evening shadows swell to the top of the cliff far above him. The sky is a scar of purple between the cliffs. The bike is in pieces around him. Scattered, as if he were the only thing holding it together. Gun gone. He makes a grieving noise in his throat, and then it's done. His brain rearranges his legs so that they are beneath him and his head is at the top of him. He examines the detritus with scattered eyes for anything useful.

“Hell of a fall.”

He spins, pain clattering in his joints, teeth bared. A pile of walking tatters

_bones to walk in his belly bones to cry in his ears_

comes out of the dusk. Holds up its hands. “It's okay. It's me.” The manshaped pile pulls back a hood and it's bones he knows.

“Ah,” he says, backing like a wild thing.

“It's okay,” she says again. It's the one that had prayed. A little blood-guilty voice in his head: _he's a crazy smeg who eats schlanger._

“You should lie down. I'm not a sawbones but you probably have a concussion. And a few broken ribs.”

“Mm,” he says.

“My name is Keeper. But I was Dag before. Remember?”

“Mm,” he says.

“If you're looking for your stuff, I salvaged what I could. That bike was a piece of shit, even for out here. Come on.” She turns. Walks toward a bend in the ravine. A yellow wiggle of light, a lewd little sun, drapes against the curve of rock.

He wants to turn and run, because her eyes are the color of the sky.

The smells of the wasteland are never green, but the one that hooks him by the nose is. His stomach walks and his legs talk and then he's sitting at her fire, the color of war and home, and she hands him a bone with a tumor of hot greasy brown flesh clinging to it.

He grunts and looks a question at her.

Chewing her own, she says _well get on with it_ with her eyes. The fire turns them glittery purple. “It's not people. It's pig.”

“Huh.” He cocks his head, his eyes wide and dark. Pig? He knows he knows the word. His teeth know the flesh, but do they? People his teeth know, not pigs. Didn't they grow pig hearts to put in people?

The girl with hair the color of the wind smiles. “You _do_ know what a pig is, yeah? Great fat beastie with pointy feet and a snout like this...” She pokes her nose up. Her nostrils are twin bullet holes in her face. “They make a fuckawful smell, but I like them. They're nice to you if you know what songs they like.” She tears off a strip of flesh and chews dreamily.

His tongue slips out to catch a rill of drool. His teeth ache and his stomach tantrums. “Fine,” he mutters and oh _oh_ the taste of flesh without bones is a bonged gong at the bottom of his brain. He groans. Licks buttery grease off his fingers, palm, dusty hand. His tongue is too short to get all of it around his mouth. Ah, his hands are empty. He grieves. But the pain in his head is less. He looks up at the girl who sings to pigs. “Where did you find them?”

She stops sucking her bone. “The first thing Furiosa did after we got back the Green Place and got rid of all Joe's things was send out scouting parties. Way out. To places Joe wouldn't go.”

_Across the salt?_

“We found an old woman. She has pigs. Joe knew where she was and she'd almost killed him. That's why we never knew about her. Furiosa doesn't like her but I do. She has--”

A scuffle in the sand behind him. The girl flicks her arm by her side and suddenly there is a pistol in her hand. He whirls, fireblind, and stares uselessly into black. Another scuffle. A whip-quick double flash of yellow eyes. A gunshot over his shoulder. The echo screams inside his head

_reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee_

but he doesn't need his ears to haul the goggled, flopping thing into the circle of firelight.

They watch it die together.

“Was it one of yours.”

The girl who sings to pigs shoots him a glare. “I'd know my own people.”

He looks at her.  _When there's only dust to drink and sky to eat and the only promises other people keep are the ones they carve into bullets, there is no_ my own people.  _There is no own. Or people._

_There is only_ my _. And_ dead _._

She reads his eyes. Her young face hardens. “I'd _know_ my own _people_.” She kneels and begins to unpack the body. He glances behind him for the dead man's friends. The last of the close-range shot is fading but still loud in his head. It adds to the headache already there. The dead man's flesh, when uncased, is the color of bone. “Here,” the girl says. Nudges his hip with the butt of a gun. “Check it. I don't see any antiseed on him.”

It's a revolver. He cracks it open, rotates the chamber. “Three.”

“Ah, this one was a deserter. Look.” She points to the marks on the arms. They look like pink cables worming just beneath his skin. Shaped like gears and engine parts. Hydraulic limbs.

Hydraulic heart, set to pumping by a dead hand. The man lying in a pool of blood dark as oil died a machine without a purpose. A man without a god.

Maybe he and the other warboys would make the next generation of windwalkers. Maybe the wind would never die; maybe there would never be a shortage of wronged souls to rattle the air in breathless rage.

“Bloodbag.”

“Ah--!” He jerks up. Against the dead end wall of rock beyond the firelight leans another one. A bright blue stripe of terror lights up his spine. He aims the gun at one big eye.

The girl looks at him, whirls. Whirls back, eyes big and blue. “What? Who's there?”

The warboy's eyes flick down to the body. His? They all look the same. No. “He wasn't witnessed,” the warboy says sadly.

“Yes he was. We saw him. Killed him.” His voice is shaky and deep. “You need to leave. Go back to being the wind.” His hands twitch on the revolver.

The warboy with the blue eyes smiles at him. “That's not the way it works.”

The girl who sings to pigs is at his left elbow, looking in the direction of the warboy. “Who is it?” Her voice is expectant and feathery.

The warboy raises a slow, greasestained hand. Points to his left, his eyes eating up his face. “Witness her well,” he says. Turns. Walks into the rock.

“Who did you see?”

“Nobody.” He stares at the wall.

“You always were twitchy. Furiosa still calls you Fool, you know.” She kneels down again. He watches her finish stripping the body and it suddenly occurs to him that she'd done that with his bike too; that was why the parts were flung wide like a dingo kill.

He squats even though it hurts his ribs. “Is there more pig?”

She pauses. Without looking at him she rips something gleamy and sharp from some stitches on the inside of the body's shirt. A tiny knife, sharpened into nothing. The rapid fire sound is gunshots a million miles away. “Yes.” she stands, rummages in the pack perched on the seat of her bike, comes back. The thing in her hand is dark and stiff. “It's dried and salted. I don't have much water, so be careful how much you eat.”

He shoves the entire thing into his mouth anyway, because it smells like the stuff did before. He growls because it's fighting his teeth. There is a subtle metallic bitterness in the meat but there is a loud metallic bitterness in everything. He isn't worried that the meat is tainted. The girl who sings to pigs wouldn't eat tainted meat. She's got green to live for. “Mmm,” he says, and swallows.

“Take what you want off him,” she says, rocking back on the heels of her boots. “No fucking bullets.” She spits the words. Contempt crinkles her nose.

“Three bullets,” he says.

“Tch,” she spits, but the acknowledgement is there.

The safety on the revolver is broken, so he tucks it into a pocket on his thigh and kneels to the body.

The girl who sings to pigs has picked it naked. Not much use, except a few filthy swatches of cloth and a leather strap and buckle she'd left. He works his mouth around the salty-metallic leftovers of the pig.

"Wish we could catch the schlangers who were chasing you. They stole our truck."

"I blew 'em up."

"Nah, you just pissed 'em off." She sits and begins to clean the knife she'd taken.

The fire flickers. He glances at the belled globe of sooty glass that holds it prisoner. The black scrim of oil at the bottom is low.

"More of your people?"

Anger flickers in her blue eyes. "My people know better than to be so shitty at sneaking up on other people."

A fly begins to buzz by his face. He swats at it. But then there can't be flies? The desert doesn't let things lie long enough to rot. Eyes wide below furrowed brows, he darts his body in circles. There is no fly. Are there fly-ghosts now too?

"Pa."

The little skullheaded child is standing beside the pig girl, tiny hand on her knee. His baby bowlegs are filthy with crusted maroon. His eyes, globes suspended in empty bare sockets, are the color of the sky. “Why did you let me die?”

_Does every fucking body out here have the same fucking eyes_

His heart kicks a sick bolt of adrenaline into him. “ _Do_ they all have the same eyes?”

The girl who sings to pigs raises her head. “Eh?”

 _Don't look at me._ He shakes his head. His hand grips the gun in his thigh pocket. The girl notices. Her face and shoulders lift.

“Is there another one,” she asks, like she's been looking forward to it. “Another ghost?”

He little skullboy cocks his tiny-jawed head. “Our eyes are a window to your soul, Pa.”

The pig girl tracks his eyes. “It's close to me, isn't it? Right beside? Who is it?”

He shakes his head and backs, because the skullboy is toddling toward him. The gun is in his hand. The pig girl gains her feet and bolts sideways, out of his aim. Cracked blue terror sears the inside of his skull because these bones _walk_ and these bones _talk_ and he didn't make these bones he didn't and they shouldn't be this _close_ they cannot touch me they _cannot touch me they canno--_

The skullboy places a tiny gentle hand on his thigh and the touch is a haymaker from a boulder-size fist. His body is rocketed sideways and he screams but the ghosts speeding past pluck the sound from his throat. Their blood-flecked whispers their bone dry guilt their keening rage which is really sorrow pours into him like a second soul spreads over him like a second skin pushes out of him clamps down on him and he can't breathe can't move their eyes are blue their wide wild eyes are all the color of the hateful sky _they cannot touch him THEY CANNOT TOUCH HIM_

“Fool.”

The hands gripping his cheeks are warm and bony and gritty. Like a spooked pony he twist-rips himself from in front of her ghost-colored eyes. His back slams against something hard and rough. A sharpness stabs him between the shoulderblades. He barks and spins to look. Rock. Sullen yellow light fights with orange shadows in the folds and cracks and leaps at him like snakes. He snaps backward

_theycannottouchme_

and spins again when his boot hits something that clangs. The exhaust from his bike. His heart pistons against his chest. The girl who sings to pigs holds her hands up in the firelight and begins to move them in sinuous shapes. His eyebrows rocket up his forehead. They trail ghosts of themselves. Each nonsense syllable out of her mouth is heavy, hanging off every heavy word, realer than the sky-eyed ghost stubbornly clinging to the hem of her jacket.

“What are you doing?” His voice tolls fuzzily in his skull.

“Helping,” she breathes.

“Uh,” he grunts, eyeing the skullchild. “They can't touch you.”

“Maybe they need to,” she says. “Quiet. I need to concentrate.”

He stands at the bottom of the wasteland night with a dying fire and two ghosts for too much company. The girl who sings to pigs rolls her eyes back in her head and chatters, her hands waving patterns in the black air. The rocks around them shimmer, purring against the girl's chants as if they enjoy the weight of the words. He shakes his head to clear it. But it clutters it more. Everything is too dark; too close.

“What's better,” the skullheaded boy asks softly. “Dark dreams or bright sky?”

“Nnnnnn,” he says in a wordless negation of the child's question. The sound drags out of him like guts.

The girl who sings to pigs begins to sing to him, the sound pouring out of her lips like water from the hose Furiosa had beaten him with. The child's outline, stark in firelight against the inky night, blurs. He shakes his head to clear it. But it clutters it more. Everything is too fuzzy; too not-there.

“Stop,” he says. His voice cracks along a faultline in his brain.

“It's okay,” the girl says, her hands up in a double-stop gesture. They flip; now she is a supplicant. They come together. “Tell me the ghost's name.”

“Huh,” he says, watching her fingers twitch through unknowable motions. “Dunno.”

“What does she look like?”

“A baby.”

The girl's eyes snap open, a world-eating storm of blue. “ _A baby?”_

He snarls a submissive grimace. “He. A baby. Called me Pa.”

“Sprog,” the skullbaby says, a skeletal thumb clicking against lipless teeth. “Don't you remember?”

“Sprog,” he says to the girl, unable to not. “Don't you remember?”

“Your baby?” She asks, her hands leading swirling contrails that he cannot stop wanting to touch.

“Ah,” he says. He tries to think but it's all sand and gunfire. “No. I had a... girl. One. One two. One. Red. Black. Go.”

“What is Sprog saying?”

He looks at the fuzzy half-boned ghost. “Did I eat your marrow yesterday?”

The baby blinks its gaping eyes without lids. “You eat it every day, Pa. You're alive because of it. Remember when you would kill men who ate my marrow? Before you traded your green heart for fleet feet and eyes that only see blue?”

“I have to survive,” he says. “I just want to survive.”

“For what,” the girl and the skullheaded boy demand together.

He opens his mouth but only nightblue drops in. It's heavy and drifts into his feet and anchors them there. The fire is almost out and it doesn't comfort him because the darkness will not shield him from them. It won't even be dark. The wasteland never sleeps.

“For surviving,” he grunts.

“That's not enough,” the girl who sings to pigs grunts back.

The girl with bloody lipstick loops her hand through the pig girl's crooked right elbow. “Where did all your righteous causes go, Pa?”

He makes a trapped-animal noise in his throat.

“You wouldn't have helped us if all you'd wanted to do is survive and eat children's marrow,” the pig girl says.

“Mmm,” he says, flicking his eyes across the pig girl's body to the ghosts bookending her.

“Who else is here?” she asks. “Boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

“Child?”

"Ah,” he says, and the fire goes out. Darkness swoops in with a subaural _pop._

“Tell me the other one's name,” the pig girl says. All three of them are as real as each other now, congealings of paleness in the heavy blueblack. The stars wink on. No moon tonight.

“Dunno.”

“Her name was Angharad,” the pig girl says. Her voice is soft.

Understanding is a dropped kick into his belly. “Huh,” he coughs. “You did this,” he points shakily at the pig girl. “You made me see them. So you could see her.”

“Don't be stupid, Fool. I can't _see_ her.”

Summoned, a taller ghost, trailing draping fluttering white, steps out from behind the pig girl. She lifts the skullchild into her arms. He rests a tiny fist on top of her swollen belly.

“Don't blame my sister,” the new ghost says. Her eyes are pits of sparking nightblue. “She's trying to find the thing you dropped.”

“A righteous cause,” the young ghost-girl says.

“There are no more righteous causes,” he grunts. “They're long dead.”

A ripple passes through all four of them. “Fool.” The pig-girl.

“No, Pa.” The blood-lipped girl.

“I didn't die for a dead cause.” The pregnant ghost.

Cold bluewhite starlight drifts on their shoulders and the tops of their heads. He shakes his head to clear it. It only clutters it more. Blood pools in his feet. Hurts.

“There are _only_ righteous causes left,” the girl who sings to pigs snaps. Her words are new-shoot green and crack like gunfire. “We've done all the killing that needs to be done. We build now. We plant seeds, not antiseed. What more righteous cause is there?”

He narrows his eyes and jabs a finger at the pig girl. “There's _always_ killing to be done.”

“Always marrow to eat, Pa?” the skullboy's small high voice cuts him.

“Your eyes can see more than one color, Fool,” the pregnant ghost says. “It's a choice.”

“I don't _want_ it,” he says. “I've had enough. Leave me alone.” He pries his feet out of their heavy stillness and his brain jerks them away from the ghosts.

Three of them are waiting down the canyon when he gets there. He starts, hissing breath in between his bared teeth.

The blood-lipped girl approaches him

_notheycannottouchme_

and he shies but she keeps walking

_notheycannottouchme_

and stops. Squats like she's greeting a frightened dog. “Pa, Angharad is right. You don't see anything worth surviving for because you've stopped looking. Before, you thought killing _was_ a righteous cause, but that's not your fault. That's just what they told you. What they made you into. But now they're all gone, and we don't have to keep doing what they tell us to do anymore.”

“I'm _not._ I'm doing what _I_ have to do.”

“No.” Angharad steps forward, a dead child in her arms and a dead child talking in her belly. “They wanted everyone to be afraid. Before they killed the world and after. Fear turns everything one color--” three pairs of eyes flash brilliant, skullsplitting blue, “and those who deal in fear can blind those who don't. Make them into marrow-eaters. Machines. Make them into not-things.”

He is dimly aware of the pig girl by his side. She does not speak.

“But we're done with that,” the skullchild says, and rests his head on Angharad's proud shoulder.

“Now, we make the world taste sweet again. We turn people from fear and build a new world that relies not on power, but on love. Fear will always be there, but it's only one color.”

He shakes his head. “No. That's what _you_ died for. I didn't because I don't need a cause to die for. That's how you stay alive.”

“Stubborn fool,” the pig girl says.

The pregnant one nods. “Tell her my name, Fool.”

“Ah,” he grunts. “We are not things.”

The pig girl's hands bite his arm in a furious grip. “She's here,” she breathes. “Oh.”

Angharad smiles. “We are not things. Are you?”

The skullboy: “Are you just an empty-hearted marrow-eater?”

The blood-lipped girl: “Are you just a thing of fear?”

The questions are semiautomatic cracks across the front of his brain _pk pk pk_ and he reels, shot. He tries to shout or grunt but his throat is coated with steely salt. His hands are dead spiders hanging off mile-long arms.

Hands, glowing pink, touch his face. The sky is a sandless extension of the orange-yellow sand. Consciousness slams back into him and he flips to his feet, heart chattering. His ribs have become knives. The dawn screams all around him. “Aaah,” he says.

“Sorry about that,” a voice behind him. The pig girl, kneeling by the outline of him in the sand. “I didn't realize I'd dosed you that much. You weren't supposed to black out.” Her eyes are apologetic, filled with amber morning light.

Angharad sits beside the girl who sings to pigs, her belly perched primly on her thighs. “Did you find an answer down there?” She asks, and glances to the lip of the canyon beside her.

“Huh,” he asks, and follows her eyes. Skittishly he nears the sharp, pebbly edge. The gap is narrow; he could jump from one side to the other, but the bottom of the canyon is wider. Like a dog testing an unfamiliar scent he leans over his own feet and peers down into the canyon. The morning sun has not dug into it yet. The blueblack dark spears his brain and he shakes his head to clear it.

It is clear. Crisp and empty and he has no memory of climbing out of the canyon. But the rest of the memory is sitting in front of him, bathed in the wash of the new sun that was growing teeth as they spoke.

“Are they still there?” the pig-girl asks.

He points to Angharad beside her. “Yeah.” His finger moves without his eyes to the blood-lipped girl and skullboy, holding hands at the edge of his vision. “Yeah.”

'What are they saying?” The pig girl leans on her bike now, arms and legs crossed casually.

The words spring unbidden: “Am I just an empty-hearted marrow-eater?”

The pig girl looks at him. Shrugs. “I dunno. Nothing's really ever empty, is it? Nothing ever really ends. There's always more to do. More to build. Everything just rolls on, whether you want it to or not, and your job is to find out where you want to grab on.”

“Hm,” he grunts, remembering something he'd said to Furiosa, and a handshake that had marked his mind. “Maybe together, we can...come across some kind of...”

“Redemption,” Angharad says.

“A righteous cause doesn't need a lot, Pa.” the blood-lipped girl says.

The pig girl is tall, but narrow. He could knock her out easy and take her bike. His feet twitch. His hands curl into fists. He does not hate Furiosa, but he does not want her to grip him again. He does not...

“Bloodbag.”

He turns. The warboy kicks his legs off the edge of the other side of the canyon. His mismatched boots send feathers of dust down into the gaping blue mouth each time his heels strike the wall. His eyes are blue behind the morning sun.

“Why not? Are you afraid of more ghosts? Afraid of having them? Or making them?”

“Nnnnnnnnn,” he says in a wordless negation of the man's question, and turns back to the pig girl.

Angharad smiles a sad golden smile. “We aren't because you broke or failed.”

“Each of us in our own way is broken, and that's why we must build; why we must fill our cracks with gold,” the blood-lipped girl says.

“We are because you _remember_ that,” the skullboy says.

“You've buried your own righteous cause right in your own belly, under too much marrow. Under too many bones that walk and talk and taste like the bitter blue sky,” Angharad says.

He pants rabbit-quick, sucking in the blue air and turning his veins the color of panic. He yanks the gun out and aims it at the blood-lipped girl. At the skullboy. At the warboy. At Angharad. At the pig girl. “No.”

The pig girl jumps to her feet, one hand up and the other on her own gun. “No what?”

“No more ghosts,” he mutters. Three bullets for five targets. No. Three bullets for a million targets, because there's always killing to be done.

“Hey, Fool, I'm not ready to die for no cause. Your name is Max, right? Max? I'm sorry about what happened in the canyon. I saw you and thought you were dead, but you weren't. We're close to where she died, so I thought... since you'd seen ghosts before, you... I'm sorry. I plant seeds; I don't grow ghosts.”

He blinks. The sun presses on his shoulders and her words press into his brain.

“Come back to the Green Place with me. You don't have to stay. But let us give you another bike. It's only a day's ride.” Half of the pig girl's mouth turns up in a smile. “Remember? You made the trip with us before.”

He touches the black scarf looped around his throat.

“As long as there are bones that talk in your belly, they will make you walk on the wind,” the skullboy says. His voice is plaintive and small.

He takes a step. Raises the gun. He could knock her out and steal the bike.

Angharad unfolds her legs and rises, a beatific hand on her belly. “What, then, if you can get rid of the talking bones, and the wind in your soul dies? Would it be peaceful? Or not?”

“One.” He says. His voice is deep. Sure. “One two. One. Red. Black. _Go.”_

 


End file.
